Keep Your Hands Off my Job. Try This One Instead

Once a month or so, I receive a call from a reader wanting to know how to get my job. Yeah, like I'm going to reveal that particular tale, about how Hank Kissinger intervened in my behalf and raised the bucks necessary to buy off Ziff-Davis. So, see, you can't have my job, so don't even ask. But I recently came across another job that's just as fun. Try this one instead.

I first met Mac DeMere at a World of Outlaws race at the now-defunct Ascot Park in Los Angeles. Mac remembers that Slammin' Sammy Swindell won that day. I don't recall. What I do remember is that the race queen wore a thong bikini so minuscule that it would have gotten her arrested at the Cannes Film Festival. When she wasn't posing for photos—and there was a 45-minute wait for this activity—she was riding in the back seat of a green Skoal-sponsored Buick Regal whose roof had been cut off. What's more, she had a mascot—a brown wallaby on a sequined leash. When the race queen rode in the Buick during caution laps, the wallaby did, too, with his aquiline nose aimed squarely into the air stream, as if he were a border collie.

You don't see an act like that every day.

In any event, DeMere used to work at Motor Trend but quit to become a tire tester for Michelin. Now 50, he toils at the corporation's 3000-acre proving ground in rural Laurens, South Carolina.

On the day I recently talked to him, Mac was setting up a pair of driving events for tire dealers, shooting a video promoting tire safety in 15-passenger church vans, and writing some sort of manual related to his adventures in Michelin's fleet of Porsche 911s and Corvette Z06s, a pair of which he'd moments earlier comprehensively mucked up by sliding sideways around the wet-handling loop. By way of contrast, my own day's activities, up to then, had consisted of installing a new printer cartridge and phoning for a list of options on the Chevy Malibu.

Pretending it was career day, I asked Mac what I'd have to do to get his job.

"Get an engineering degree first," he suggested. "Participate in motorsports as a driver. Formula SAE, autocross, short-track hobby stock, bracket drags—anything and everything. Then read every book sold by Steve Smith Autosports. Get practical knowledge of cars and how they work. Today's engineering grads are full of book learnin' but have never seen a suspension naked. Get a commercial driver's license. Then do what I did: Volunteer as a gofer for a serious race team."

Even with three decades of amateur racing under his belt, Mac was forced to undergo 12 months of "rubber-sensitivity training" just to become eligible to test tires, and he spent a bonus nine months "learning how to write useful comments." Now he's officially certified to conduct 10 tests: noise, comfort, wet handling, dry handling, max handling, autocross handling, snow handling, deflated handling, wet braking, and dry braking.

He least enjoys the noise tests, in which he's asked to compare five consecutive sets of tires on a car whose windows are rolled up and whose A/C is switched off. "And the tire designer's whole goal," he adds, "may be to prove there are no differences. Meanwhile, I'm the sweat hog attempting to hear differences anyway."

He most enjoys the dry-handling tests—"for us, this mostly means steering feel"—as well as the wet-handling tests. "The wet stuff is the most like racing on the ragged edge," he claims, "because it feels like the car has a mechanical problem, and your job is to work around it, to compensate. Then you have to climb out and describe how and why you compensated, in painful detail."

Driving at nine-and-a-half-tenths and later summarizing a car's traits is a chore that troubles plenty of car-magazine guys, too. Few are good at it. "I try to become two people," Mac says. "One who's paying attention to his driving, and another who sits in the passenger seat and watches what my arms and legs are doing. It's cool going 100 mph around the handling loop, but there's always a quiz at the end of it."

What's more, blazing one-lap qualifying speeds work against him. "The subjective testers work on a 10-point scale," he explains, "and we have to be able to repeat our own tests within half a point 80 percent of the time and repeat the other drivers' tests within half a point 75 percent of the time." Neither is it merely a matter of memorizing the traits of every Michelin tire. Mac is asked to evaluate competitors' rubber, too, and rarely is he permitted to see the labels before the tires are mounted.

Even before he was hired at Michelin, Mac understood that tires were the most critical component on any car. Today he's less a believer than a preacher. "The wrong tires can turn a perfect-handling car into an evil witch," he says. "Tires can make a car feel like the suspension is out of alignment, like the steering is shot, like the roll bars and shocks have fallen off. It wouldn't be hard to make a minivan faster than a Corvette around our wet-handling course by tire selection alone. One of our tests is to intentionally mismatch tires. Do that on, say, a Porsche 911, and your biggest challenge is holding your breath long enough to climb out of the thing."

Surprisingly, Mac says he and his cronies spend little time measuring lateral grip on dry skidpads. Few car manufacturers pay much attention to that figure, so neither does Michelin. "Noise, ride quality, ability to pump water, ability to navigate snowdrifts in the Upper Peninsula in February—the real-world stuff is so much harder to achieve," he says. "And the truth is, your average Lexus LS430 doesn't see much duty in Turn Three at Daytona."

I asked how much money he makes. "Less than six figures" was all he'd say. But I think he earns his keep. During a recent in-house ride-and-drive, he had Edouard Michelin as a student on the wet-handling course. "The good news is, Mr. Michelin really stands on the gas," Mac recalls. "The bad news is, Mr. Michelin really stands on the gas. I had to think of a polite way to say, 'Hey, boss, you know what? I think you'd be quicker if you were smoother.' "

I asked Mac to name the most famous tire tester in history. "There aren't any famous tire testers," he replied.

"Well, see, there you go," I impertinently pointed out. "That's a drawback."